First Quarter: “Who Am I”

During the first quarter of our senior year, students were tasked with the Personal Essay assignment.In Digital Media, we kicked of our school year by diving into Pro Tools, a digital audio workstation. First, we mixed a song using effects and then created our own songs using MIDI instruments. Next, we began to learn about After Effects. During this project, we recorded a mini opinion piece on any topic and then created a video for it using the application. This included learning how to use the transformations and some basic animation. Lastly, we created this website using word press!

During this unit I was able to learn about what values and skills I prioritize as a person. In order to figure what I value, we used brainstorming excersizes from the book “College Essay Essentials” by Ethan Sawyer. I appreciated the time given by our English class to write our college essay, the patience I learned in Design through the many tedious, yet fun projects, and the problem solving skills learned in Digital Media acquired through website building and After Effects.

Personal Essay:

Essay Text:

 

As I lay my hand on the keyboard, a vague memory plays in my head. A little girl freely taps away on black keys, with her piano teacher smiling beside her. Yet, the rumble of a U-Haul truck up the driveway of my new house rips the image from my mind. The miles between my old house and the new stage of my life tore the relationship between me and the keys. Piano became a prisoner begging to come out of my long-term memory. In high school, my Digital Media class was the retrieval cue to upend my musically-repressed identity. I was charmed by the versatility of the grand instrument’s sound; sometimes, it would play quiet, sorrowful songs, and other times, I found myself dancing along to the melody of a pop song.

However, when I shared my rekindled passion with my dad, he quickly dismissed it, declaring that learning a new instrument was a “waste of time.” Temporarily discouraged, I pursued interests that were within my father’s “practical” reaches, such as badminton and my academics. But with every good grade and win, I felt insatiable. The following summer I met my best friend, a musically-gifted genius who could make the piano sing. As I watched her fingers waltz on the keys, once again, I fell in love. I would sit next to my friend, trying to memorize the notes of the duet Heart and Soul. I listened to songs and tried to replicate them on my keyboard. I looked up Youtube videos on how to play pop songs without any knowledge of music theory. After a couple weeks, I installed an app and gave myself beginner lessons of the staff, time signatures, and keys. But this was not enough to satisfy my hunger for piano, for soon I had reached a point where things got too complicated to teach myself. When I heard the piece Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, I ran to my mom and asked to enroll in piano lessons. She was surprisingly supportive. After weekends of work, I attended my first piano performance. I felt unstoppable, unbound to expectations and open to acquiring new knowledge and skills in my life.  It seemed to me that I had achieved the impossible.

While I may have felt like I had discovered superpowers, I did not understand why they had not shown up until now. Instead of taking the philosophical approach, I turned to my other passion and picked up a psychology book. I was curious about the nature of my doubt, my emotions and why we think, interact, and feel the way we do. To me, understanding the brain was like understanding a part of myself. I psychoanalyzed my affinity towards the black and white keys and learned that I was probably fulfilling my childhood dream of becoming a famous musician. I was fascinated by the studies of how our brains perceive, remember, and process things. More specifically, I was intrigued as to why our strongest memories tend to be emotionally attached, as seen through experiments such as the “Emotional Stroop Test” and published theories like Flashbulb Memories.  

Maybe that explains why I still remember my first piano performance. For a brief moment, I glanced over the crowd. It was a medium sized room with a piano at one end and plastic foldable chairs on the other. I was sweating through my grey sweater dress, and in an effort to keep myself together, I held my breath. The world around me dissolved. I drew a breath and my hands started to flutter up and down the keys. When my piece came to an end, I stood up and bowed. I had done it. As I walked past an array of applause, I saw my father’s hands clapping for me too.

Digital Media; Perspective Piece

In Digital Media, we were told to write 1-2 minute opinion piece on anything we would like. I wrote mine about the Earth and how it’s crazy we live on a habitable planet. After recording our piece on Pro Tools, we used After Effects to make a video for it. We used images and some light animating to make it more interesting.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

 

Design:

In Design, we began to study the elements of art. Our first project was to study lines and shapes through photography, which we did by creating the letters of our name through random objects and different perspectives. Next, we studied implied line by painting aboriginal art, which is a type of dot art that originates from the time of cave art. For the project, we each had to choose an animal and color scheme. I chose a humming bird and an analogous color scheme. For our fourth project, we studied the principles of design through line art. Our final project of the quarter was to create a collage in order to study shape and space. The first stage of this project focused on making a physical collage using pictures from a magazine. The second part had an emphasis on shape and color. For this portion of the assignment, we outlined the shapes in our collages and painted them using a monochromatic color scheme. For the last portion of this project we had to create a digital collage using Photoshop. The final part of project encompassed color, shape, typography, space, and more.

 

Collage Project:

Magazine Collage

Monochrome Shape Collage

 

Aboriginal Art:

Aboriginal Art of a Hummingbird